Forgotten Queens

Award-Winning!

Forgotten New York was the first-ever recipient of Outstanding New York City Website by the Guides Association of New York City in March 2015!

Forgotten New York is associated with the Greater Astoria Historical Society

Office Space for Rent

800 sq ft. $2,200/month office - avail now!

Not like those office shares...this is a real professional space!

Freshly painted, carpeted, new restrooms, professional/non-profit floor,
most convenient location in western Queens, shopping and restaurants across street,
includes shelving, office furniture and desk, carpet, and air conditioner.

FLUSHING ZIPPER FACTORY

Throughout most of Shea Stadium’s existence (except for the last couple of years, when Citifield was being constructed) a large, four-sided clock tower was visible beyond the left-field fence with a flashing neon sign. This was the Serval Zipper Factory, for the past few years a U-Haul distributorship. The clocks, of course, stopped long ago.

The structure was originally the Queens office/factory of W & J. Sloane Furniture Co. on Lawrence St. (now College Point Blvd.) in Flushing.

Serval Zippers was always the first thing I saw coming out of the subway tunnel and the last thing going in. I haven’t ridden the #7 since the ’60’s and I hope they never tear the tower down. In Baltimore they kept the Bromo-Seltzer tower as a city landmark, NYC should do the same for zippers!

While this building was the old Serval Zipper Factory when I was growing up in Corona in the 1950s and 1960s, it wasn’t always a zipper factory and certainly was not the shambles it is today. The building originally housed a W. & J. Sloane furniture factory at least through the late 1930s, according to information from a series of photos depicting the building in the NYPL Digital Gallery. I don’t know when Serval bought it. I remember seeing the clock tower from the No. 7 Flushing Line train I took to go to the Flushing YMCA and then Flushing HS in the 1960s. The factory was erected near the former site of Willowbrook, the white-porticoed 19th century mansion owned by the Lawrence family, for which Lawrence Street is named. The same Digital Collection displays several black-and-white photos showing Willowbrook as it appeared around 1910, as a handsome structure fronted with thick doric columns and flanked by a park-like setting of shade trees and grassy lawn that ran down to the Flushing River. Willowbrook was destroyed by fire in 1927.